by Nora Ephron
The next day, he called Bernstein and told him to come by his house immediately. Bernstein arrived within a few minutes, and the first thing Collin asked him to do was to sign a release absolving Collin of any responsibility for what he was about to say. Bernstein signed and Collin began talking. He told Bernstein to fix the spaghetti sauce, eliminate the crab claws from the menu, and do something about the chef, who, Collin said, was “a Massachusetts Greek who didn’t know from Turci’s.” If Bernstein failed to make improvements, Collin said he would be forced to give the restaurant a bad review—which he had in fact already written, and he read a few sample sentences from a piece of paper: “Frankly, we would all have been better off last year had the real Turci’s been allowed to die a natural though unwelcome death.… It seems to me that in the move uptown what the new Turci’s has proven is that one can turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Requiescat.” Within a few days, the chef quit—Bernstein says it had nothing to do with Collin’s ultimatum—and Collin returned to the restaurant for a review. He gave the new Turci’s three stars. “Try finding the likes of Turci’s even in Italy,” he wrote. “The new Turci’s has the setting this marvelous restaurant has always deserved—a splendid place in which to serve its grand food.…”
At this point, we must pause to introduce a new character in this drama, a person Collin refers to as “my own favorite platonic dish.” Rima Drell Reck Collin is a professor of comparative literature at the University of New Orleans, an editor of The Southern Review, and, according to her husband, “the most creative and gifted cook in the world now.” She had just finished writing a New Orleans cookbook with her husband and was planning to open a food consulting firm in partnership with Warren Le Ruth of four-star, ten-platonic-dish fame. “The firm,” says Collin, “was an attempt to get her out from being Mrs. Underground Gourmet. She’s got enormous talent, but in this town she is still Mrs. Underground Gourmet.”
One day a few weeks after the good review appeared, Joe Bernstein visited Richard and Rima Collin to talk about the restaurant. He was still concerned about its inconsistency, particularly when it came to the spaghetti sauce. One thing led to another, and before the session was up, Bernstein had hired Mrs. Collin’s firm to fix the sauce. Bernstein paid her two thousand dollars for two months’ work—after which time she and Le Ruth, who had not been able to implement a new recipe, fought with each other and dissolved the partnership. The next month, Mrs. Collin sent Bernstein another bill, which Bernstein refused to pay. There was considerable shouting on Bernstein’s part and considerable crying on Mrs. Collin’s part. According to Bernstein, Mrs. Collin threatened his bookkeeper and said that if he did not pay up, the restaurant would be hurt. Bernstein did not pay.
It was at this point, Richard Collin says, that he realized for the first time that he was in a spot. “I was in a very bad situation,” he said. “It was okay as far as helping the restaurant and shaking out the sauce—that struck me as a civic restoration—but once a falling-out occurred, I knew that anytime I changed the rating it would look suspect.” In January, 1975, just before the Super Bowl, Collin nonetheless printed a revised set of ratings for New Orleans restaurants. Turci’s was stripped down to an altogether new category—a star within parentheses, meaning “some good food but not a recommended restaurant.” What intrigued the owners of Turci’s about this new rating was that Collin had not eaten in Turci’s at any time since his original review had appeared.
A month later, Figaro, a small New Orleans weekly newspaper (in which, in keeping with the tenor of this saga, Joe Bernstein’s children own a minority interest), broke the story. Figaro’s editor, James Glassman, quoted Bernstein and Collin on the Turci’s episode, and also quoted Chris Ansel, the owner of Christian’s Restaurant, who said that Collin told him to fire his chef and cut down on the salt; when the chef failed to do so, Collin stripped Ansel of his stars and eleven platonic dishes. The Figaro article caused a sensation. The New Orleans Restaurant Association wrote the States-Item demanding that Collin be investigated. The Louisiana chefs association seconded the motion. A group of local restaurateurs tried to pressure the National Restaurant Association to drop Collin from a panel discussion at the association’s annual convention. There were television debates. There was an acrimonious press conference. Mrs. Galatoire of Galatoire’s accused Collin of not ordering a dish he subsequently reviewed. The New Orleans Times-Picayune—which has an active rivalry with the States-Item although both are owned by the Newhouse chain—unleashed its food writer to attack Collin.
Eventually, of course, the furor died down. The editor of the States-Item admitted that Collin had been “indiscreet” and that some of his behavior bordered on “a conflict of interest.” The Times-Picayune food writer announced that he would write a rival restaurant guide in which no restaurant would receive an unfavorable rating. Bernstein, not having managed to formulate the spaghetti sauce, moved on to specialize in canneloni. The people of New Orleans settled down to dinner. And Richard Collin learned a lesson. Not the exact lesson he might have—about the function of a critic, for example, or about the limits of critical involvement, or about the ethics of critical behavior—but he did learn something. “I learned,” he said, “that restaurants have a limited lifespan, and there’s no point in trying to save them.”
September, 1975
How to Write a Newsmagazine Cover Story
You Too Can Be a Writer
You can learn, in your spare time, to write articles for publication, and if you master the art, you can be paid to do it on a full-time basis.
Of course, there are all sorts of writers. There are reporters, for example. Reporters have to learn how to uncover FACTS. This is very difficult to learn in your spare time. There are also serious journalists. But serious journalists have TALENT. There is no way to learn to have talent. There are also fiction writers. But fiction writers need IMAGINATION. Either you have imagination or you don’t. You can’t pick it up in a manual.
But there is one kind of writer you can learn to be and you will not need FACTS, TALENT or IMAGINATION. You can become a newsmagazine cover story writer. Just master the six rules enumerated below and you will know all you need to about how to write a newsmagazine cover story—or at least the kind of newsmagazine cover story dealing with life style, soft news, and cultural figures.
RULE ONE:
Find a subject too much has
already been written about.
To do this, read with care the following: Women’s Wear Daily, Vogue, Joyce Haber’s column, Suzy’s column, the “Arts and Leisure” section of the Sunday New York Times, Rolling Stone and the movie grosses in Variety.
Any name mentioned more than four or five hundred times in the last year is a suitable subject for a newsmagazine cover.
RULE TWO:
Exaggerate the significance of the cover subject.
Study the following examples to see how this is done by the experts:
“Today, a few weeks shy of twenty-six, Liza has evolved in her own right into a new Miss Show Biz, a dazzlingly assured and completely rounded performer. The Justice Department should investigate her. She is a mini-conglomerate, an entertainment monopoly” (Time on Liza Minnelli, February 28, 1972).
“At thirty-five, Coppola stands alone as a multiple movie talent: a director who can make the blockbuster success and the brilliant, ‘personal’ film” (Newsweek on Francis Ford Coppola, November 25, 1974).
“Finally, the film confirms that Robert Altman, the director of Nashville, is doing more original, serious—yet entertaining—work than anyone else in American movies” (Newsweek on Nashville and Robert Altman, June 30, 1975).
“At twenty-nine, salty Lauren Hutton is America’s most celebrated model of the moment—and the highest-paid in history, as well.… Her extraordinarily expressive face and throwaway sex appeal, captured in the strong, spirited photographs of Richard Avedon, have made Hutton a permanent fixture in the pages of Vogue and at least a passing
fancy in five movies. And in contrast to the exotic stone-faced beauties of the 1960s, her natural gap-toothed, all-American good looks epitomize the thoroughly capable, canny, contemporary woman of the Seventies” (Newsweek on Lauren Hutton, August 26, 1974).
“Margaux is the American Sex Dream incarnate, a prairie Valkyrie, six feet tall and one hundred thirty-eight pounds.… Effortlessly, Margaux stands out in a gallery of fresh young faces, newcomers who are making their names in modeling, movies, ballet and in the exacting art of simply living well. They add up to an exhilarating crop of new beauties who light up the landscape in the U.S. and abroad” (Time on Margaux Hemingway and the New Beauties, June 16, 1975).
RULE THREE:
Find people who know the subject
personally and whose careers are bound up
with the subject’s. Get these people to comment
on the subject’s significance.
“Add to all this her beliefs in the trendy cults of mysticism and metaphysics and she becomes thoroughly modern Marisa, aptly crowned by the International Herald Tribune’s society chronicler Hebe Dorsey as ‘the girl who has everything plus’ ” (Newsweek on Marisa Berenson, August 27, 1973).
“ ‘This event is the biggest thing of its kind in the history of show business,’ modestly declared David Geffen, the thirty-year-old human dynamo, ‘Record Executive of the Year,’ chairman of the board of Elektra/Asylum Records, who just pulled off one of the great coups in the music business—signing Dylan away from Columbia Records” (Newsweek on Bob Dylan’s concert tour, January 14, 1974).
“This is Roy Halston Frowick … known simply as Halston—the premier fashion designer of all America.… Halston’s creative strength derives from personally dressing the most famous and fashionable women in the world, and while his name is not yet a household word, his impact on fashion trend setters is considerable. ‘Halston is the hottest American designer of the moment,’ says James Brady, the former publisher of Women’s Wear Daily and now publisher of Harper’s Bazaar. Fashion consultant Eleanor Lambert goes even further. ‘Along with Yves St. Laurent,’ says Miss Lambert, ‘Halston is the most influential designer—not only in America, but in the world’ ” (Newsweek on Halston, August 21, 1972).
RULE FOUR:
Try, insofar as it is possible, to imitate
the style of press releases.
“On the one hand she is very American, with deep roots in the South and an almost apple-pie adolescence (from cheerleader to campus queen). There is about her a touching innocence, openness, expansiveness and vulnerability. But at the same time she is no bright-eyed square. She breathes sophistication, elegance, grace, passion, experience. Dunaway has become more than a star—she is a style and a symbol” (Newsweek on Faye Dunaway, March 4, 1968).
“She is the rural neophyte waiting in a subway, a free spirit drinking Greek wine in the moonlight, an organic Earth Mother dispensing fresh bread and herb tea, and the reticent feminist who by trial and error has charted the male as well as the female ego” (Time on Joni Mitchell, December 16, 1974).
“There are many things gorgeous about Robert Redford. The shell, to begin with, is resplendent. The head is classically shaped, the features chiseled to an all-American handsomeness just rugged enough to avoid prettiness, the complexion weather-burnished to a reddish-gold, the body athletically muscled, the aura best described by one female fan who says: ‘He gives you the feeling that even his sweat would smell good’ ” (Newsweek on Robert Redford, February 4, 1974).
RULE FIVE:
Use statistics wherever possible.
Better yet, use statistics so mind boggling
that no reader will bother to do simple
arithmetic to determine their impossibility.
One example will suffice here:
“[There are] one hundred million dogs and cats in the U.S.… Each day across the nation, dogs deposit an estimated four million tons of feces” (Time on the American Pet, December 23, 1974).
RULE SIX:
Study the examples.
Read more newsmagazine cover stories.
Learn to use adjectives like “brilliant,” “gorgeous,” “original,” “serious” and “dazzling” with devil-may-care abandon.
Learn to use clichés with devil-may-care abandon.
Master this technique and you too will be able to get a job writing back-of-the-book cover stories at a newsmagazine. You too will be able to take a subject, any subject, and hype it to the point where it bears no resemblance to reality. Whomever you write about will never be able to live up to what you write about him, but never mind. The important thing is that people will talk about YOUR STORY. They will talk about it for years. They will say how strange it was that the career of whomever you wrote about seemed somehow to slip after the cover you wrote appeared. They will allude ominously to the Newsmagazine Cover Curse. But you will know better.
So begin now, before it’s too late. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go work at a fan magazine.
October, 1975
The Boston Photographs
“I made all kinds of pictures because I thought it would be a good rescue shot over the ladder … never dreamed it would be anything else.… I kept having to move around because of the light set. The sky was bright and they were in deep shadow. I was making pictures with a motor drive and he, the fire fighter, was reaching up and, I don’t know, everything started falling. I followed the girl down taking pictures … I made three or four frames. I realized what was going on and I completely turned around, because I didn’t want to see her hit.”
You probably saw the photographs. In most newspapers, there were three of them. The first showed some people on a fire escape—a fireman, a woman and a child. The fireman had a nice strong jaw and looked very brave. The woman was holding the child. Smoke was pouring from the building behind them. A rescue ladder was approaching, just a few feet away, and the fireman had one arm around the woman and one arm reaching out toward the ladder. The second picture showed the fire escape slipping off the building. The child had fallen on the escape and seemed about to slide off the edge. The woman was grasping desperately at the legs of the fireman, who had managed to grab the ladder. The third picture showed the woman and child in midair, falling to the ground. Their arms and legs were outstretched, horribly distended. A potted plant was falling too. The caption said that the woman, Diana Bryant, nineteen, died in the fall. The child landed on the woman’s body and lived.
The pictures were taken by Stanley Forman, thirty, of the Boston Herald American. He used a motor-driven Nikon F set at 1/250, f 5.6–8. Because of the motor, the camera can click off three frames a second. More than four hundred newspapers in the United States alone carried the photographs; the tear sheets from overseas are still coming in. The New York Times ran them on the first page of its second section; a paper in south Georgia gave them nineteen columns; the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and the Washington Star filled almost half their front pages, the Star under a somewhat redundant headline that read: SENSATIONAL PHOTOS OF RESCUE ATTEMPT THAT FAILED.
The photographs are indeed sensational. They are pictures of death in action, of that split second when luck runs out, and it is impossible to look at them without feeling their extraordinary impact and remembering, in an almost subconscious way, the morbid fantasy of falling, falling off a building, falling to one’s death. Beyond that, the pictures are classics, old-fashioned but perfect examples of photojournalism at its most spectacular. They’re throwbacks, really, fire pictures, 1930s tabloid shots; at the same time they’re technically superb and thoroughly modern—the sequence could not have been taken at all until the development of the motor-driven camera some sixteen years ago.
Most newspaper editors anticipate some reader reaction to photographs like Forman’s; even so, the response around the country was enormous, and almost all of it was negative. I have read hundreds of the letters that were printed in letters-to-the-editor sections, and t
hey repeat the same points. “Invading the privacy of death.” “Cheap sensationalism.” “I thought I was reading the National Enquirer.” “Assigning the agony of a human being in terror of imminent death to the status of a sideshow act.” “A tawdry way to sell newspapers.” The Seattle Times received sixty letters and calls; its managing editor even got a couple of them at home. A reader wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Jaws and Towering Inferno are playing downtown; don’t take business away from people who pay good money to advertise in your own paper.” Another reader wrote the Chicago Sun-Times: “I shall try to hide my disappointment that Miss Bryant wasn’t wearing a skirt when she fell to her death. You could have had some award-winning photographs of her underpants as her skirt billowed over her head, you voyeurs.” Several newspaper editors wrote columns defending the pictures: Thomas Keevil of the Costa Mesa (California) Daily Pilot printed a ballot for readers to vote on whether they would have printed the pictures; Marshall L. Stone of Maine’s Bangor Daily News, which refused to print the famous assassination picture of the Vietcong prisoner in Saigon, claimed that the Boston pictures showed the dangers of fire escapes and raised questions about slumlords. (The burning building was a five-story brick apartment house on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay section of Boston.)
For the last five years, the Washington Post has employed various journalists as ombudsmen, whose job is to monitor the paper on behalf of the public. The Post’s current ombudsman is Charles Seib, former managing editor of the Washington Star; the day the Boston photographs appeared, the paper received over seventy calls in protest. As Seib later wrote in a column about the pictures, it was “the largest reaction to a published item that I have experienced in eight months as the Post’s ombudsman.…